Orla Wren: The One Two Bird and the Half Horse

There are a lot of good people I know who would love the music of Orla Wren. They wouldn’t find the conformist list of non-conformist credentials on the band’s site to be intensely annoying, they wouldn’t have frequently referred to dreadlocks as cancer of the hair, like me (full disclosure: I am in my fifth year of remission). But it gets my goat. Why is it so important to tell the world that you live in a horse-box and sleep in forests? Is it because without these credentials the music lacks an identity for listeners to buy into, without which it sounds like twee incidental music for a bad film about building geodesic domes?

I think so. How can someone write that they “broke away from the unnecessary trappings of the modern world” in the same sentence where they describe themselves as a “lap top wielding… Neo Gypsy”? With a highly developed sense of Eco-hypocrisy, that’s how. You know, that sense they sell you in the weekend newspapers. Calm down Davey Boy!

I am definitely not suggesting that people shouldn’t make music until they have become the embodiment of some seamless, impregnable philosophy, they just shouldn’t use their imagined persona as a crutch to sell their sheep at market. A way of validating their creations which is no different to the techniques applied in the mainstream. This particular brand of bullshit is admittedly an easy target as it is soft and relatively unpretentious, unlike the lava-lipped propagandists of Free-Noise and Skronkiness for instance.

There are a lot of people like that round these parts: intentional communities, shitbox squats lorded over by trustifarians and cosmic casualties, make-believe warriors of the Eco dimension. They often make good company, good people living amidst the cloud of neurosis that has become a fashionable way of life. Some of them, like Tui, the core musician of Orla Wren (who may or may not be like the people I described, though he has done his best to implant that pre-conception in me), know how to play something other than the Djembe, which is a good thing. He also knows how to record and process sounds, and he does it very well.

Metallic twinkles, toy harps, melodicas, awful hippie coos from a lass, bowed things, wheezy accordions. Tibetan Singing Bowls too on ‘33 Fainting Spells’! I should have predicted that one; I’m obviously not a mystic. One writer by the name of David Sheppard has described this album as “the music Fennesz and Lau Nau might make after a night laying beneath the glittering constellations”. I like Lau Nau’s album Kuutarha and I can hear some similarities, but the compositions lack enough personality and shades of song to stand alone, something which Lau Nau achieves amidst far more immersive and ethereal atmospheres.

I don’t know much of the music of Fennesz, so I don’t know what to say about that. If I had a mongrel pup in front of me, and I was told that the dog on it’s left (Lau Nau) was the mother, I would have to imagine that absent father dog was a lobotomised grey wolfhound and that the mother dog had been artificially inseminated due to lack of motivation on Daddies part, but I get the impression that the music of Fennesz is probably nothing like that at all.

I was just interrupted, physically halted, by the awfulness of the girls warbling on ‘Some Tales Wait Shy’. I can at least foresee accusations of cold soullessness on my part, but I have to say I hate it. Force fed, boil in the bag, organic eccentricity. Okay, it might be in the Hebridean tongue perhaps, but that doesn’t make it musical. There are some nice sounds all over the album and occasionally flashes of actual interest like the woodwind calls at the end of ‘Some Tales…’, but, how can I put it. I would rather listen to Enya all week, than listen to this record ever again. Maybe another over-worked simile will help:

You know in Short Circuit II when Oscar and his gang have decked the shit out of Johnny 5 with a baseball bat and he’s leaking fluid and losing his marbles, spouting gibberish? Well imagine a version paid for by the Greenman festival where Johnny 5 is a robotic musician responsible for the music of Adem, Tunng, Psapp and Nalle. This is the gibberish he would be spouting after that bout with the diamond thieves, and he certainly wouldn’t turn into a badass revenge robot with a Mohican. He’d grow some dreads and read books about Permaculture while smoking his brain into a marijuana Never-land.

I’m sorry, I can’t help all this cynicism! It’s probably not very nice to read, but it’s just what happens when I’m in a room with twee, folksy, hippi-tronica. If you think I’m a bastard for ripping into these people, then perhaps you should thank me because you might go looking for Orla Wren and find some good times. Personally the only bit I can actually say I like is the final two minutes of ‘The Unbowed Hand’, where a pair of violins evoke something clear and sad, and hence create a vivid landscape that I feel I can see and explore. The rest of the time it looks like useless fragments of something that was once beautiful. Like seeing a photo of scattered puzzle pieces at an art gallery, it has little to say behind the façade.